Do you think render to sample should be allowed?

knetter wrote:On the other side you can make your whole song one big sample - or big chunks of it...We can also decide to have more free-to-render/record-all rounds and less totally-restricted.. I don't know, we may also decide to keep it like this...

I take part since 8 months now and have never seen a song that was that crippled (beside of my Xmas render - but this was an exceptional round . Even if it would happen, it would not happen all the time and we as community would give the artist proper feedback.

knetter wrote:Yeah but thats dangerous, since it is a tracking compo, and not everybody has the skills to play acoustic instruments nor the skills to sing properly (like me). You can end up with just playing 2 tracks: a singer and a guitar player. Don't know if we want that, since you can do that without a tracker too...

What's the prob with vox+guitar only ? Right at the moment we could have vox only and almost nobody sings acapella . They usually add bass, drums, means work still with samples and so on.

BTW: we already had tracks that used a lot of vox and less instruments:

Moreover I don't think that the masses of decent instrumental freaks will enter SDCompo. I think there are better places and Compos for such people.

We could give it at least a try. If it's abused we could easily forbid it again.

E.g. we could start with an exceptional test round were natural instruments are allowed. I bet there will only be a few people that would try it anyway.

A further thing:
On the long term Renoise will support wav tracks. Then we'll have a tracker that's a bit more like a DAW. Means: the future will bring an evolution/merge of tracking and classical DAW. Tracking as we know it will change again IMO. It has already changed by the introduction of DSP andI like it and are not afraid of the things that will come.

Generally I see more possibilites than dangers when new features are available.

The future will be bright ... hopefully

PEACE !!

Last edited by Airmann on Sun Mar 08, 2009 7:15 pm, edited 2 times in total.

is this a tracker compo or a renoise compo? just because a feature exists in a so-called tracker doesn't mean it's align with the spirit of the competition. one of these days i'll release tenfourTracker with its built-in 30gb orchestral sounds. should that be allowed too?

sorry... slippery slope arguments are dumb.

what i mean to say is that renoise is becoming a real sequencer, not just a tracker. is SDCompo driven by renoise?

I think it's simply convenient to say "only internal features are allowed". that makes for a very black-and-white set of rules for the compo.

I don't think this feature actually drives creativity. And who really cares if it does - I mean, if "it cramps my creativity" was a valid argument for allowing something into the compo, then we should allow everything. This compo is full of restriction; that's it's beauty. There are plenty of compos out there that just let you submit an MP3 and who cares what you used to create it.

that, to me, is not the spirit of this competition. SDCompo should have its own set of principles regardless of what features happen to be in a specific tracker. Renoise development should not drive sdcompo.

this is how i view it of course. i'll be cheery no matter what happens i don't use render to sample so it's easy for me to say.

Airmann wrote:E.g. Prodigy or Mike Oldfield made a lot of cool tracks combining E-Guitar an electronic stuff. It's really difficult to reproduce live played Guitar synthetically.

So let's allow natural licks, please !!!!

Yeah but thats dangerous, since it is a tracking compo, and not everybody has the skills to play acoustic instruments nor the skills to sing properly (like me). You can end up with just playing 2 tracks: a singer and a guitar player. Don't know if we want that, since you can do that without a tracker too...

I like the rules as they are (already posted in a vote) but similar to when we had a VST round, or a drawing round, maybe we can have another "wildcard sample" round, or a "no vocals this time" round?

As an aside, though I will take a vocal's legibility or presence in the mix into account when judging, I usually don't care if the singer is on key or not, as this is not a singing competition.

chunter wrote:As an aside, though I will take a vocal's legibility or presence in the mix into account when judging, I usually don't care if the singer is on key or not, as this is not a singing competition.

What the crap? That is about the craziest thing I've ever heard

It's still a music competition. And better singing = better music. More pleasing to the ears. More likeable. More memorable. Maybe I'm just taking it to the extreme by imagining someone whose voice sounds like complete ass entering the compo, and you still judging them only by the mix.

tenfour wrote: is SDCompo driven by renoise?

It actually is for the most part. It started life (the first 10 or so rounds) as a Renoise only competition. And the vast majority of the entries are still Renoise. So yes, I would say that what happens in the Renoise community and what the Renoisers want is going to be more influential than just about anything else.

Singing is nice and it adds some kind of comprehension to a track.
This will most of the time increase appreciation. If somebody has a very nice voice, I find it rather difficult to judge the track. This is because I'm tempted to like the human familiar sound but I have to look at the total picture. So I also give the tracker part more weight, like chunter, than the sound of the voice.
(I know, its also an art to mix a vocal with the music...)

I agree with tenfour about the productivity of the restrictions - without restrictions I have less inspiration. We also want to exploit the features of Renoise. Its about finding the right balance - thats what I like about this discussion. And since there is a big majority in favor of r2s, its not a big change (yet ) that this feature is banned... (damn that word sounds so ... harsh)

Airmann, I noticed you posted a question in my song Firmament after I posted the link here...

"But I think you've could added the vox without rendering everything to sample, or ?"

very similar to Knetter's original comment:

"A pity that the song is totally down mixed and that nothing is revealed how it is made... (I think for this reason SD should not allow render to sample, but that is another discussion)"

What you guys are not understanding about this song is the version before I rendered the WAV's out for the compo version looks exactly the same -- with 2 C4's starting at the beginning -- One for the beatboxing, and one for the vocals. The only things you are missing out on "seeing" are the plugins that I used to process the vocals, which I obviously can't include for playback in the track, thus I am required to render the WAV's ...

Those plugins are: Melodyne, and decabuddy

On the beatbox track, I used a bit of Melodyne in rhythm mode to correct a few rhythm errors. Ever so slightly

On the vocal track, well, actually let me first tell you how I recorded this:

I actually had decabuddy blasting through my headphones monitor WHILE I was recording the vocals... I had already practiced for about 10 minutes and had a rough idea of what notes I was going to sing because I was already hearing the harmonies being blasted back live through my headphones. Then, I recorded it (without effects... so at this point Decabuddy was only in the monitoring)

After recording, I plugged Melodyne in to correct the pitches. (turned decabuddy off for this). After the pitches were fixed, I turned decabuddy back on to have it play the harmonies on the pitch corrected vocals.

That's it.

Then I rendered the beatbox and vocal tracks to a new WAV, started them back over at the beginning. I think I even left my delay settings on the beatbox track in the XRNS so there is at least something to watch "happen live", as it were.

So in this case, I was not intentionally trying to hide anything, it is just that the plugins aren't allowed in the competition. You seriously aren't missing out on any "special tricks" on the vocals. Both the beatboxing and the vocals were recorded in one take (seperately). There was no splicing/pasting or anything like that.

Near the end of the song, the strange contrast between parts of the vocals that almost sounds like filter modulation effects, is just a natural artifact of switching between my chest voice and falsetto ... The contrast got even more exaggerated because of the decabuddy processing, which made it sound pretty strange.

These days, the process is the same on my vocals except I'm also adding external compressors on them, and toying with the idea of using better reverb plugins than the native Renoise ones.

chunter wrote:As an aside, though I will take a vocal's legibility or presence in the mix into account when judging, I usually don't care if the singer is on key or not, as this is not a singing competition.

What the crap? That is about the craziest thing I've ever heard

It's still a music competition. And better singing = better music. More pleasing to the ears. More likeable. More memorable. Maybe I'm just taking it to the extreme by imagining someone whose voice sounds like complete ass entering the compo, and you still judging them only by the mix.

I see your point, but let me clarify.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe most of us are on low to medium budgets when it comes to making music. I do not want to vote someone unfavorably simply because they do not own a copy of melodyne or autotune. It is still possible for the vocal to detract from the piece, and of course, bad sources instantly become a bad mix, There have been a few illegible lyrics since I started visiting. Nothing personal to anyone reading, but if I've said "put a compressor on that vocal" it probably means you.

If sdc becomes an arms race of gear or VSTs, I won't enjoy it as much.

( I must footnote,
Some of my opinion on the subject relates to formerly and currently liking artists that are notorious for singing poignant lyrics that are otherwise occasionally off key. )

I'm not put off by Airmann's idea of allowing an extra instrument (and I would rather see it like the round that allowed a wilcard sample, not require it to be a guitar, because if someone in here can play violin, flute, oboe, or cello, why not allow that too?) The issue most of us are taking is that the reason there is a "pack" is to limit ourselves and see what each of us do within the limits.

Returning to the main idea, though; if you're going to use Render to Sample, it'd be nice to those of us still learning the software if there is an explanation as to why the render was done and what sort of things were rendered.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe most of us are on low to medium budgets when it comes to making music. I do not want to vote someone unfavorably simply because they do not own a copy of melodyne or autotune. It is still possible for the vocal to detract from the piece, and of course, bad sources instantly become a bad mix, There have been a few illegible lyrics since I started visiting. Nothing personal to anyone reading, but if I've said "put a compressor on that vocal" it probably means you.

If sdc becomes an arms race of gear or VSTs, I won't enjoy it as much.

HINT: as time goes by more and more free high quality VSTs appear on the market. Compressors for vox you will find thousands. For automatic or manual pitch correction I'd recommend Reaper. It's practically for free.

Returning to the main idea, though; if you're going to use Render to Sample, it'd be nice to those of us still learning the software if there is an explanation as to why the render was done and what sort of things were rendered.

So I also give the tracker part more weight, like chunter, than the sound of the voice.

The tracking aspect of this contest seems to be really important to some of you guys.

For me that is not the case:

I participate primarily in order to make music, not to explicitly make "tracked" music. Moreover I don't use Renoise because it's a tracker. I use it, because it has a nice workflow and I don't like piano rolls.

Maybe this is an important aspect of this discussion.

It seems that you guys want to maintain and "enshrine" the good tradition of tracking. In contrast people like me just don't really care about tracking itself. Indeed I'm looking forward to the day when Renoise will be even attractive for people which still have to use Cubase and it's awfull workflow because of the WAV features.